Interview — The Decemberists

By Shannon McGregor

With The Decemberists journeying to the St. Augustine Amphitheatre on Sept. 29, we thought it best to give you a little taste of the literary indie rockers, ahead of one of the year’s most anticipated shows in the Oldest. With their folk-rock opera, Hazards of Love, hitting No. 14 on the Billboard charts earlier this year, the Portland musical literati broke into the mainstream. Here, bassist Nate Query talks about just that – along with recollections on meeting President Obama and battling with Stephen Colbert.

Drift: Your music channels such disparate ideas – everything from ancient Irish history to Japanese folk tales. Do you sit around on the tour bus reading a library full of books?
Nate Query: It really comes from Colin (Meloy, vocalist). Something will catch his interest, and he’ll dabble with it and pursue it. Sometimes it’ll turn into a song, and in the most recent case, into a whole record. With The Crane Wife EP, he’d heard that Japanese folk tale, and I think he tried to write a couple songs about it over time, and it finally came together in that three-part suite. With this record, he’d been dabbling with metal riffs. At first it was going to be a musical, exploring themes common during the British folk revival and combining it with metal riffage – but it turned into more of a rock opera. I really like how he tries to write differently than more personal-oriented songwriting.

D: How does the songwriting process work for The Decemberists?
NQ: Usually Colin brings us the songs in some sort of acoustic format. He works them out until they’re effectively finished songs, and then he brings them to the band. That’s when we work out arrangements, instrumentation and stuff like that. Sometimes he brings more fully-formed ideas than other times; it sort of depends. As far as the songwriting itself, that’s usually done by the time the band sees it. Sometimes things will change, depending on what we come up with.

D: Your music is often based on fiction or folklore, but leading up to the 2008 election, the band embraced politics – playing at fundraisers, holding voter registration contests at college campuses. What brought on the political sensibility?
NQ: In the 2004 election, I ran into a guy at SXSW that was starting an organization called Music for America, and we did voter registration at that point. We’d always made a point of being really non-partisan, so it was just a voter registration drive. But more and more we got excited about getting involved when it made sense. Right after Obama announced his candidacy, some of his people invited us to hear him speak. We were playing a few blocks away in Milwaukee, so we went, and I kept in touch with Michael O’Neill, who still works for him in the White House. When it came up that maybe we could do something for the Portland rally, we were into it – because that would be totally amazing. Anything we could do. It turned out to be phenomenal – there was something like 75,000 people there, a beautiful day and something really unique for a primary. We are all committed to making things better and doing our part. We try not to get too preachy on stage or get too political overtly because that can be a little distasteful for artists sometimes. But we were all really excited to be a part of the Obama campaign.

D: Did you get to meet Obama when you performed at the Portland rally?
NQ: Yeah, we met him real briefly, but we met him. There’s a picture on our Web site, “The Decemberists with Obama.”

*****
The Decemberists
Where: St. Augustine Amphitheatre
When: Tuesday, Sept. 29 at 7:15 p.m.
Tickets: The St. Augustine Amphitheatre Box Office is open:
Mon-Fri – 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Sat – 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Sunday Closed
Tickets can also be purchased at ticketmaster.com or by phone at (800) 745-3000.
More info: staugamphitheatre.com
*****

D: Hazards of Love is your second album on Capitol Records after moving from Kill Rock Stars. How has the change worked for you?
NQ: The biggest difference in terms of making the records is that we have a bigger budget, so we can spend more time in a nicer studio. It doesn’t make that big of a difference day to day. I don’t think we made a different record than what we would’ve made anyways. We just might have shorter workdays in a more comfortable setting. As far as the other stuff with Capitol, there’s a totally different bureaucracy. They’ve done a total corporate restructuring at least once since we’ve signed up with them, so that’s a little odd. With Kill Rock Stars, it was like two interns and Slim Moon in the office, and that’s it.

D: Your last album hit No. 14 on the Billboard chart. Did you ever think The Decemberists would end up there?
NQ: Not so much. It’s pretty crazy – that was really exciting. We thought this album was going to be a little more challenging, from a marketing perspective. It’s a harder one for people to just immediately latch on to, because it has a more complex story – there’s not any “hit” songs on it. So that it hit that high on Billboard was amazing. That said, it’s a lot easier to hit high on Billboard than it used to be. Record sales are so down; you don’t have to sell nearly as many records as you used to do really well. Not to diminish our own success or anything, but it really is a big difference, even in the amount of time that I’ve been in the business.

D: Now Stephen Colbert has moved onto feuding with Grizzly Bear, but before that, he had a tiff with The Decemberists, culminating in a guitar solo competition, where Peter Frampton was tapped by Colbert to duel your guitarist, Chris Funk. You’ve got to tell me a little about that.
NQ: We were actually flying home from a tour, watching Comedy Central and saw him call us out for that green screen thing. And we were like, “Whoa.” When we got home, there was a lot of banter back and forth about how to respond, and we decided to challenge him to a guitar duel. Our people got a hold of his people, and he was totally into it. It just snowballed – it fell right into our laps. It happened just a few days after we’d had this meeting of like, “What’s the next step in marketing The Crane Wife?” with our label, which is kind of a hard meeting for us to have because we don’t always think that way. And then Stephen Colbert is making fun of us, which is incredible.

D: Henry Kissinger was there, right?
NQ: I know, isn’t that crazy? I called Chris before it aired, but after it taped. I asked him how it was, and he was like, “I’m at Stephen Colbert’s Christmas party, and Henry Kissinger was there!” I was like, “What?” I thought he was lying – I didn’t really think that Henry Kissinger was on the Colbert Report, but apparently, he was.

D: You’ve played several times now with full orchestral accompaniment. What’s it like playing with such accomplished classical musicians like those in the Los Angeles Philharmonic?
NQ: The Hollywood Bowl, especially, was the best one. The philharmonic approached us about doing a show, and they hooked us up with an arranger who would make the arrangements for the orchestra to go along with our stuff. And then we decided to see if we could book a few more around the country, since we were going to have the arrangements already, and turned it into sort of a mini-tour. It was really fun, but it’s really a lot of work. You just sort of show up, you do a short rehearsal/sound-check with the orchestra, and then you play the show. It’s much more regimented, and it’s much more difficult to monitor yourself. There’s an element of it being a little surreal during the actual performance. Playing the Hollywood Bowl to such a crowded house was really a high point – it was a pinching-myself kind of moment.